Steiner's name for machine-made products as dwellings of ahrimanic demons that work on the sleeping human will, coined in his 1920 Stuttgart lectures.
Technicisms in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's coined noun, in German Technizismen, for the manufactured products of modern technology understood as dwellings for ahrimanic demons. Steiner introduced the word in Polarities in the Evolution of Mankind (GA 197), a lecture cycle given in Stuttgart in 1920, where he measured the new machine world in horse-power years and asked what spiritual beings live inside it. Where earlier humanity perceived luciferic elemental beings in the phenomena of nature, in water, wind, and growth, ahrimanic spirits now stir in engines, factories, and apparatus. These beings act directly on the human will, which sleeps below waking awareness, so their influence goes unnoticed by the intellect that built the machines. The term marks the historical turn from a luciferic to an ahrimanic environment. Today it anchors anthroposophical readings of automation and behavioural technology as forces that shape the will beneath consciousness.
Technicisms names the machines, engines, and manufactured apparatus of the modern age when they are seen as habitations for ahrimanic spiritual beings. Steiner invented the word because no existing vocabulary captured a world humanity had built outside itself, one that now determines human destiny the way nature once did. Unlike the old nature-spirits, which met the waking mind, these beings reach the will while it sleeps.
In Steiner's Own Words
In the past human beings had at least some awareness of demonic powers. Today demonic powers are restively stirring in all products of technology; their activities extend into the sphere of the human will, but human beings are not yet inclined to accept this. In the first place these things are at an unconscious level and in the second place people feel it would be superstitious to say that demonic spirits are active in the machines they have produced. They are active nevertheless. The spirits perceived in the phenomena of nature in older times were luciferic by nature; the spirits active in machines, in all products of technology, are ahrimanic by nature. Human beings are thus surrounding themselves with an ahrimanic world that is growing completely independent of them.
What it Means Today
Steiner's claim sounded like superstition in 1920: machines as houses for demons that bypass consciousness and grip the will. A century later the social psychologist and Harvard Business School professor emerita Shoshana Zuboff documented, in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019), an industry built on exactly that architecture. Zuboff shows how behavioural data extracted from phones, speakers, and connected devices feeds prediction products designed to tune, herd, and condition human behaviour, and she stresses that the intervention works because it operates outside awareness. The user never meets the mechanism; the mechanism meets the user's will. Her name for the resulting apparatus, Big Other, describes an instrumentarian power indifferent to what we think and interested only in what we can be made to do.
Steiner said the demonic activity in Technizismen escapes notice for two reasons: it works at an unconscious level, and modern people feel it would be superstitious to seek spirits in their own products. Zuboff's research removes the second objection without needing the first, since the behaviour-shaping force is now empirically measured. Thalira synthesis: a technicism is any made thing whose working face addresses the sleeping will rather than the waking I, and Steiner's countermeasure was not smashing the machines but strengthening what meets them, the conscious will held by the Christ-impulse. Reading Zuboff beside GA 197 turns her question, who decides who decides, back into Steiner's older one: which beings are deciding while we sleep?
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